Bar Fights' Drunken Truth

July 7, 2004|By Peter Carlson The Washington Post

With the possible exception of reality TV, nothing illuminates the comic pathos of the human animal better than a bar fight.

I remember one I witnessed in a Boston dive in the '70s. It began with the usual slurred swearing and shoving. "Whaddaya gonna do about it?" said one drunk, and of course the other drunk replied, "What are you gonna do about it?" Finally, one guy threw a big roundhouse right that caught the other guy above the ear. There was a loud, painful cracking sound, then the puncher slumped to the filthy floor, wimpering and cradling his hand, which he'd broken on the punchee's cranium. The punchee slurped up his beer and swaggered out as if he were Muhammad Ali.

"The bar fight has a sublimity all its own," Miles writes. "Because it's fueled by alcohol, it's usually a rank amateur's game with all the unpredictability this implies, and it's sometimes lacquered with a gloss of comedy."

To prove that point, Miles recounts the story of a fight he witnessed at a Wyoming bar that was holding a Hawaiian night. Both combatants were males wearing grass skirts. The winner was also wearing a bikini top made of coconut shells.

As Miles points out, most bar fights involve young males: Testosterone and alcohol make a powerful cocktail. But occasionally women will brawl -- a weird and wondrous sight that frequently includes savage hair-pulling and face-scratching.

"If you're accustomed to ladies of a genteel sort, there's a world-upside-down element to them," Miles writes, "and they can sometimes have the frightening appeal of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel."

After a brief history of the barroom brawl -- "the original bar fight surely happened within hours or days of the appearance of the first bar" -- Miles reveals the results of his unscientific survey of bartenders, bouncers and barflies about the main causes of these battles.

"Women, property lines and dogs," said one of those experts.

"Drunks, women and drunk women," said another.

Other causes include arguments over politics, sports and the songs played on the bar's jukebox. They may sound like dumb reasons for a fight but, as Miles points out, there's frequently more to the story.

"To the unschooled observer, a fight that breaks out in a bar because one guy took offense at the song another guy played on the jukebox might seem random and ridiculous," he writes. "If you'd known that the guy who played that song had stolen the other guy's girlfriend a half-decade before, and that the song he played was the Aerosmith ballad that had been on the radio when the poor fella first unsnapped her bra that night by the lake, it might make more sense."

Of course the best advice on bar fights is: Avoid them. Do what the high-class folks do -- drink at home and fight your loved ones, not common barroom riffraff.